


Burning Heart

by CyanideBreathmint



Series: The Fox and the Wolf [2]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Don't feel sorry for Ren he's a self-radicalized mass-murderer, Explicit Sexual Content, M/M, Phasma Ships It, Pre-Canon, Slight Hurt/Comfort, Snoke Ships It, Spoilers, don't feel sorry for Hux he's an evil space Nazi, improper use of First Order medical resources
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2015-12-25
Packaged: 2018-05-09 08:02:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5531912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CyanideBreathmint/pseuds/CyanideBreathmint
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How have the things Kylo Ren learned from Hux informed what he already knows?</p><div class="center">
  <p>--- </p>
</div>Content warnings for self-flagellation and scourging, explicit violence against innocent civilians and combatants, discussions on child corporal punishment, character injury and gore.<p>Also content warning for the inside of Kylo Ren’s head, because that boy ain’t right.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Burning Heart

**Author's Note:**

> This one is really dark. 
> 
> A good chunk of this fic was inspired by the music video for Rammstein’s _Rosenrot._ Title taken from Dante's _La Vita Nuova_. 
> 
> Also, the First Order are seriously bad people, and if you come away from this fic thinking otherwise, please stop and think hard about why you feel so. 
> 
> This fic is a follow-up to _Cold Feet_. It can be read independently of said.

Kylo Ren sat crosslegged on the cold metal floor of his private quarters aboard the _Finalizer_ , his mind cast wide like a net. No. Not a net. More like the slow inexorable spread of tree roots or a parasitic vine twining its way through the ship’s superstructure, every power conduit a minute hum in his consciousness. He felt the delicate currents of air in the ship’s atmosphere ducting caress the outstretched fingers of his mind like countless faint breezes, coolant and lubricant thrumming like a pulse through the subtle vibrations of pumps and engines. The reactor core was a miniscule sun suspended in shielding that shivered and chimed against his un-touch.

And then there were the minds, dull with end-watch weariness or circulating endlessly in routine shift-thoughts. _Stand by for docking handshake. All clear. Stand by for docking handshake._ He felt the hot points of pain clustered in Medical, the cold sharp alertness on the ship’s bridge, ambition with a taste of iron and copper in his mouth, oh so much of it. And underneath it all, underlying it in breathless aching the tiny moments of hate and anger that fuelled the dark – Stormtroopers enacted internal discipline on a malingerer in a rough blanket party while Command looked the other way, a communications officer noted and documented her direct superior’s squeamishness with a creamy satisfaction, oh, and all those knife-bright minds in the CIC, all of them oriented on one singular point, on a man standing before the great viewport on the bridge, General Hux. 

The anger burned like acid, and the hate tasted like bitter dregs, but Kylo Ren drank it all in and felt it strengthen him, a point of heat knotted right behind his heart, and he let it fill him, suffuse him, drive his thoughts outward to caress the surface of Hux’s mind. So much hate for the Republic and the Resistance and his powerful discipline shackling it. Ren could not read Hux’s thoughts, not from this distance, but he could taste the delicate wash of his satisfaction and caution and anticipation. His restraint. 

Kylo Ren drew his senses back towards his body, back towards the cold hard floor and draft of air against his bare chest, breath from the ventilation ducts stirring his hair. He began to shiver only when he stepped back into his skin, into his imperfect prison of muscle and bone and sinew, of the slow beat of his heart and the blood suffusing his veins. Always there was that tug somewhere in his gut, that siren whisper. _Come back. You can always come home._

In response he drew his knees up and shifted into a kneeling position so he could pick up the slim cloth-wrapped package at his side. He drew the fabric away to reveal a bundle of knotted rope that unfolded into a scourge. With a low growl he swung it up and back to lash at his own shoulders, gasping and shouting as the pain began to fill him and cleanse him of light. The knots of the scourge bit into his back, welted his skin as he felt the weakness leaving his body.

“My hate is strong,” Ren gasped breathlessly into the empty room as drops of blood and sweat ran down his flanks, pattered softly on the cold floor around him as he flung himself wholly into the mortification of his flesh. But what lingered constantly in the back of his mind was not the purity of his discipline, the well of his anger. No, what he thought of instead was the bruising grip of Hux’s hands on his hips, that mouth teasing and painful at turns, and the clean hurt of sharp teeth denting the flesh of his shoulder. Tears and sweat ran down his face, dripped off his chin as he redoubled his discipline. The First Order had again found traces of Lor San Tekka and with him, perhaps, the map to Luke Skywalker. Kylo Ren needed to be strong to carry out his search. Strong, ruthless, everything that Darth Vader had been, save for the weakness of his sentimentality. This was not a time to think of the pleasures of the flesh. 

Kylo Ren left the room masked, robed and gloved. His back and shoulders itched and stung, fresh raw weals rubbing up against the fabric of his undertunic, but the discipline had left his mind brimming with resolve, rage, delicious anger. He paid no attention to the Stormtroopers and their endless patrol circuits past the room door – they were used to his screams by now, anyway – and stalked to the hangar bay, where Captain Phasma and her detachment of Stormtroopers waited by his command shuttle. He felt pure, very light, as though he were now a glass and metal vessel of hate. The pain always worked. It purged his weaknesses, centered him and focused his mind, and now he was ready to go planetside, to make his mark upon a galaxy that had always seemed so heedless of him, careering on in its sickening, nauseating grandeur.

\---

“I want you to make the acquaintance of General Hux,” Supreme Leader Snoke had said almost casually as Kylo Ren had knelt in the audience chamber before the tiny glowfly motes making up the image of his Master in hologram. This audience had marked the end of one lesson and the start of another, one of his many steps further into the dark.

“Do you anticipate treason, Master?” Ren had asked Snoke. Treason, disloyalty and gross incompetence marked the few times his path intersected with specific individuals in First Order command, and the subsequent violence often required ended those associations fairly swiftly. 

“No. Hux is loyal,” Snoke leaned back in his throne, but his stare burned still through Ren, through his mask and the vast distance separating them as points in space. “I want you to cultivate him. Become his friend. Seduce him if you wish.”

Ren did not feel as though he had heard Snoke correctly. “Master?” Friendship was not generally something the Knights of Ren specialized in. Neither was seduction. 

“You will have access to his dossiers,” Snoke went on, as though Ren had not spoken, “Access to his files and personal preferences from the Intelligence Directorate. Do as you see fit, as long as you do not impede his efficiency.” 

“This is a test.” Ren said after a moment’s silent thought. It was easier to frame those orders into the familiar framework of testing and training, easier to think about it. 

“Yes. Also a reward.” The Supreme Leader spoke drily, but Kylo Ren felt a faint frisson tingling in the pit of his belly, spreading outwards to thrum in his jaw and teeth, the base of his spine, his fingertips. It took an effort of his considerable will to keep his hands loose and unclenched. 

“Master.” He bowed his head in acknowledgement.

“I believe that the General is a man worth cultivating, Kylo Ren,” Snoke had said. “Inform me of your progress.”

It was only after the hologram had winked out, when all was silent, that Ren realized that the Supreme Leader had not specified who that exercise was supposed to have been a reward to.

\---

The forest burned, raised a thick choking smother as resinous bark popped and ignited. Fallen trunks slewed drunkenly and began to char as Stormtroopers fired at stragglers trying to hide in the woods. Ren had burned that forest himself, seized a flamethrower from one of the Flametroopers and ignited the brush to drive the fleeing villagers out.

Captain Phasma had approved the gambit, and her own Stormtroopers were now marching to encircle the doomed forest so they could round up and apprehend any fugitives who survived. Meanwhile, Ren had waded into the blaze, his lightsaber clearing a firebreak just broad enough for his own passage. 

“Where,” he shouted, “is Lor San Tekka?” A desultory rain began to fall, sizzled and steamed against the fire and the embers and the blade of his lightsaber as he strode towards the fugitive he had been after, the old, feeble village elder. The thin cloth of her wraps and tunic had begun to smolder and singe from the trees burning around her. The soles of her feet were blistered and weeping from running over coals after she had lost her sandals trying to flee. 

“Where. Is he?” Ren asked again, pinning her in place with the Force, “Lor San Tekka.”

\---

Hux’s dossiers were extensive, exhaustive, and Kylo Ren had sat at his desk late into the night shifts studying their contents, the minutiae of his life. The Intelligence Directorate was nothing if not thoroughgoing and meticulous. 

_Height: 1.85m. Father served as Commandant of the Academy on Arkanis. Top of his class._

Ren read those files for hours and then crawled onto his pallet for a few hours of rest night after night, the words swarming behind his eyelids when he closed his eyes. All those records. Lists of sexual partners, of subtle power grabs. Hux had eliminated a predecessor more than once, but always so discreetly that those incidences had never been officially tracked back to him. The First Order permitted those subtle coups to happen because they eliminated officers who had been foolish or inefficient, individuals for whom Internal Security or the Knights of Ren would have come for sooner or later. Hux was a careful man. The perfect First Order officer, it seemed. He kept his range certifications to date, passed all his fitness tests, and had been careful to avoid accusations of impropriety in his career to date. 

In fact, General Hux’s psychological profile indicated that he was a thoroughly dangerous man, the kind the Supreme Leader would have been forced to eliminate were he not so loyal and fixated upon the destruction of the Resistance and the Republic that fed it. His hate made him a fanatic easily harnessed to the purposes of the state, and it blunted the sharp edges of his ambition just enough to make him an asset to the First Order rather than a threat. 

Sometimes Ren fell asleep swiftly after the evening’s studying. Other times he was held awake by details that unfolded in his imagination and bloomed in his mind. On those nights he would sometimes imagine what it would feel like to lie next to Hux. He wondered about how it would have felt to open himself up and trust someone else to touch him. 

He applied these fantasies, layer by layer, into his plans on how to approach the General, to cultivate him, as the Supreme Leader had bid. In those nights Ren’s thoughts lingered often on Hux’s bed partners and preferences – his tastes were broad and undiscriminating, the man something of a sexual chameleon himself, but the intelligence dossiers had painted a consistent picture of what he disliked. 

Sometimes the only way to define something was to define its antitheses. Sometimes the only way to draw a tree was to draw where its branches were not. This was a similar sort of thing. 

Hux disliked being courted or pursued – his high rank meant that he attracted a small cloud of would-be sycophants in most situations, and he had never treated them with anything but bland politeness and a hint of disdain. No, he much preferred to pursue instead, an approach Ren understood intimately. How then to bait a fellow predator? Present them with something other than prey. Prey could stir the predator, but was then swiftly consumed and cast aside for the scavengers. 

Kylo Ren would have to present General Hux with something intriguing. Something unexpected.

\---

The weak drizzle had stopped and the old human woman was a screaming wreck by the time the Stormtroopers had cut their own path into the burning forest so as to catch up to Kylo Ren. He had simply held her in place with the Force and waited for the encroaching fire to do its work. She had talked, predictably enough.

“There are two Resistance spies,” he told the Stormtroopers. “A female human and a male Bothan. They both came here seeking information on Tekka. Find them.” 

“Yes sir,” they said, and then began to march out of the smoldering wood to search for the fugitives Ren had described. 

He left the woman where he had found her. Her screams echoed behind him as the fire spread further, fanned by a hot, ashy wind. The cries plucked at Ren and strummed at the weakness and pity in him, but he did not turn back. She would stop screaming eventually.

\---

The more Kylo Ren studied the dossiers on Hux, the more he had realized that he did not truly know the man. Oh, he knew many things about him. He knew how he thought. But all that knowledge did not add up to the essence of knowing him.

Knowing people had bored Kylo Ren for a long time. They had betrayed and disappointed him or simply failed him in other, more fundamental ways. His Master and the other Knights of Ren were the few individuals he knew who he could rely on, and even that was a conditional thing. 

So when the Supreme Leader gave him this test, this assignment to know the General (in more senses than one), Ren had wondered about it as he had studied the dossiers, wondered what the point of the lesson was to be. Hux had surprised him greatly. Ren had expected in his rawness and inexperience to be seized, taken, and used. Hux had used Ren, true but he had also taken only as much as Ren had been willing to give. That generosity had stunned Ren and then thrilled him as he started to unravel the secret of it over their liaisons. 

Hux had been a patient, magnanimous lover because he had owned his power. He gave because it had not cost him anything to do so, knowing that he could take what he wanted when he wanted it. That had been a delicate kind of control applied with wonderful finesse, and it had left Ren desperate to learn more. 

And learn more he had. Ren had learned at first the rufous color of Hux’s hair and those ice-blue eyes that holos could never capture in full. Of the changing taste and fragrance of wislix tea, and how Hux reacted to events calculated specifically to surprise and puzzle him. Ren had studied the man’s hauteur, his patience, and that ruler-straight part in his hair. Ren learned Hux’s sense of humor and obligation; how he liked to touch, kiss and fuck, and how he slept after. There had been so many little details to memorize, and each of them an ephemeral moment that the dossiers could never adequately quantify – the rough feel of Hux’s greatcoat against his own bare skin, the nip of Hux’s teeth on his flesh, that eager shudder down his spine as he got close to climax.

\---

The Stormtroopers had rounded the surviving villagers up in the village square and boxed them in, backed them against the sides of the village’s central well. Leaf-thatched roofs burned around them and small stone houses collapsed as the flames devoured beam and log-pillar alike. Kylo Ren felt nothing but disgust at the sight of those villagers huddled together like kine for the slaughter. He had sent Captain Phasma to supervise her unit’s sweep of the area while he personally went through the papers and documents his forces had recovered from the spies’ abandoned safehouse and waited for results.

The old woman had spoken the truth. He had tasted it in her thoughts as her mind had started to light up with pain, and it had remained there even as her feet had started to char and burn. Pain could make people tell him anything he had wanted to hear but Kylo Ren had learned to winnow falsehood from the myriad thoughts burning in their minds. Each layer of agony was like a lens that sharpened the details and led him closer to the truths they had been attempting to conceal from him. 

The intelligence was more of the usual – records of petty cowardice and the detritus of hypocrites who claimed not to support the violence of the First Order while simultaneously funding the Resistance and their subversive activities. There had been star maps left unmarked and carefully folded military-style so that he could not pinpoint Resistance activities based on them. There had also been a small ledger detailing agricultural expenditures – seed grain and pesticides and fertilizer. Kylo Ren had just noticed the large amount of fertilizer expenditures in proportion to the actual scale of local agriculture when the first of the improvised explosive devices went off. 

One of the stone houses blew apart, sending burning fragments of wood and dense stone fragments everywhere, and then another, and another, until Ren was standing alone, still eye of the hurricane in a swelling, grotesque blossom of fire and death. Without thinking he drew his lightsaber and ignited it, flicked it almost carelessly to deflect the fragments of shrapnel and broken armor, the viscera and gobbets of flesh that came within blade’s reach. Fat drops of blood pattered against his robes and rolled down the empty faceless gleam of his mask. Its inbuilt filters prevented his throat and lungs from charring in the broiling air even as shattered stone pinged off its surface. The visor darkened, and then lightened gradually so his vision remained clear despite the plumes of flame. 

Even charged with the Force his reactions were still nearly not fast enough to save him. Not especially when someone, several someones, started firing at him from the direction of the burning forest.

\---

Kylo Ren had expected Hux to assume him depraved or at least some kind of superstition-addled fool when he had first found out about the scourging in one of their discreet assignations. Instead Hux had only stopped what he had been doing to trace his fingers carefully down the welts and weals on Ren’s back. The touch had been maddeningly light, and Ren’s skin had itched and stung as the contact woke his lacerated nerves back up.

“You’re still bleeding,” Hux said before he climbed out of bed. He had broken the seal on a medpac and then told Ren to lie still while he cleaned the wounds with disinfectant.

“You’re don’t think I’m insane for doing this to myself,” Ren said. It was not a question. The sharp phenolic smell of the disinfectant filled Hux’s bedchamber, and he closed his eyes and tried to not to move while Hux worked. 

“Discipline comes in many forms,” Hux said as he wet the swab with more disinfectant. “This isn’t the first time I’ve done this for someone.”

“When was that?” Ren felt oddly relieved that Hux had encountered something like this before. He did not expect anyone to understand his connection to the Force, but he knew that he had not wanted Hux to think him a mere degenerate. 

“Junior classes in the Academy. I was twelve. We’d get stripes if we failed assignments or broke any rules. We’d come back to the dormitories and examine each other’s bottoms afterwards. Every instructor had a distinct caning style.” Hux murmured as he squeezed bacta from the tube onto his fingers and then smeared it onto the welts and weals, moving slowly downwards as he started with Ren’s shoulders.

“The Imperial Navy used to run on lum, sodomy, and the lash,” Ren had said as the itch and pain started to subside against the bacta’s soothing coolness. He had read that somewhere in an Imperial Grand Moff’s memoirs.

“The lash is no longer mandatory under current regulations, and we have mixed-gender crews. All we have left is the lum ration.” Hux finished his handiwork with several passes of spray bandage. 

“And even that is optional.” Ren caught Hux’s eye as he rolled over in bed and sat back up in bed, stretching his back against the slight clinging tension of the spray bandage.

“Mm. Yes.” Hux did not resist as Ren took hold of his wrist and pulled him gently down into bed and then rolled him over on his back. The scattered contents of the opened medpac bounced on top of the sheets and some of them fell to the floor. Neither Hux nor Ren cared. 

“I apologize for bleeding all over your bedsheets, General,” Ren murmured as he half-straddled Hux and pinned his wrists gently above his head. 

“We were going to do worse to them in any event, Lord Ren,” Hux said, his expression suddenly wild and wicked as Ren let go of his wrists and then leaned down to kiss him, to nibble on his plush lower lip and trace the line of his jaw with his mouth. 

Hux reached up gently, tangled the fingers of his right hand in Ren’s hair, stroked his cheek with his thumb as they kissed again, and then Ren let himself wander lower. He lingered on Hux’s neck, on the great arteries of his neck, constantly aware of the pulse throbbing under his lips. Ren suddenly felt a great temptation to take a bite out of Hux, to rip his throat out and lean into the spray of blood, but he moved on with an effort of will to trace the lines of his collarbones and the pale expanse of his chest. 

He was not supposed to impede the General’s efficiency – that very obviously meant not doing anything to kill him – but the thought of blood glistening on Hux’s skin like garnets sent an eager thrill zinging down Ren’s neck to settle in the base of his spine, frustrating and arousing him even more than before. Ren satisfied himself instead with biting gently, nipping Hux gently before soothing the tooth-marks in his skin with the warm wetness of his tongue. Hux gasped at each nip and then sighed gratefully at each caress as his fingers of his left hand closed over Ren’s right shoulder so as to guide his head further downward, a desperate unspoken supplication that Ren chose to obey. 

This too was power over someone, power that Kylo Ren had learned to wield simply by being someone Hux wanted and needed, and the knowledge made him giddy with yearning and ache with want. He wanted desperately to be under Hux’s skin, to sense his pulse and savor his life and melt the prickly boundaries of his self. 

At that moment Ren wanted nothing more than the loss of his selfhood and individuality. He wanted to tear Hux open and lean into him so they would heal together like the edges of a scar, hard and knotted and never parted again. He wanted to never be alone again.

“Roll over,” Ren whispered to Hux as he lifted his head from the dip of his belly, “Now.”

Hux stared into Ren’s eyes – how could it be so hard for Ren to remember that exact shade of blue? They were new every time he saw them – and then drew him into another long, eager kiss before he pulled away and knelt up. Ren watched the muscles shift and ripple under Hux’s pale skin as he turned around and took hold of the headboard, and the thought came absurdly to him, _that’s what’s wrong with a pallet, nothing to grab._

Ren shuffled closer to Hux, leaned into him and pressed his face into the short, clipped hair at the nape of his neck, savored the smoke-and-resin notes of his cologne and the spicy hints of his aftershave. Ren’s cock fitted so well against the cleft of Hux’s ass as they rocked against each other, and he hissed in pleasure as his right hand crept downwards against Hux’s hard belly, fingers splayed above the soft tangle of his pubic hair. 

Hux moaned softly when Ren’s fingers closed around the shaft of his cock, and he shivered with delight when Ren began to stroke him slowly, almost too-gently. “Oh Ren,” he gasped, in between strokes, “I am so glad that you’re such a quick study.” 

Ren did not reply. He simply paused his ministrations and plucked the loose tube of bacta from the bed where it had lain all this time, uncapped it and squeezed some out onto his fingertips. Hux only shivered in anticipation as Ren spread him open with slippery fingers, the gel cold and slick and then warm as it soaked up their body heat. Gentle pressure let Ren slide one finger up the tight blood-heat pucker of Hux’s asshole and he moaned, a hoarse animal sound, when Ren slid a second finger in. Ren let his fingers linger briefly before he pulled them out, squeezed more bacta from the tube into his hand and then smeared it down his own cock. 

Ren took hold of Hux’s sharp hipbones and then began to ease the greased head of his cock up his ass, a movement that elicited more moans. He was gasping himself at the tightness of Hux’s asshole, the soaking silken warmth encompassing his cock as he thrust upwards again and again in smooth, eager movements. 

“You feel so good like this,” Ren managed to whisper once as he heard the metal in the headboard creaking ever-so-faintly under Hux’s white-knuckled grip. “Am I hurting you?” 

“No. Just don’t –” _Don’t stop_ , Hux meant to say, but Ren’s next thrust robbed him of breath and speech and coherence, and what came out of his throat was a sound like a sob. There was a moan, and then another long sobbing gasp as Ren’s right hand slid off his the curve of his iliac crest and slid downward to grasp the shaft of his cock. Ren moved his hand in long, purposeful strokes matching the pace of his own thrusts. Abruptly Hux let go of the headboard and instead shifted his weight to lean back against Ren’s chest, and then they slowed down a little to rock easily together for a few breaths. 

It was getting harder for Ren to hold back. Each movement was more sensation, more need, more friction of his cock sliding up against the slick velveteen heat of Hux’s asshole. He felt his own orgasm climbing up his spine, setting his nerves ablaze as his skull rang like a tolling bell from the roar of his own pulse. He came first in long, aching spasms, spilled himself in a long liquid burst as he sank his teeth in the back of Hux’s neck and bit down hard enough to bruise. His vision dwindled away and all he felt was Hux’s shuddering stillness against his own utter immolation, and then hot spunk ran down over his knuckles as Hux’s cock twitched in his grip, as Hux came too with a long, soft _ohhhhhhh_ of relief.

\---

Ash, gore and shrapnel had only started to fall in a spattering, rattling circle around Kylo Ren when blaster bolts tore through the shroud of smoke surrounding him. The ground at his feet – a two-meter circle centered on him – had been left bare as his lightsaber blade had vaporized most of the falling debris in that range, but some small pieces of bone and shrapnel had evaded his defenses to inflict small flesh wounds on his chest and right arm. He had not yet begun to feel the pain when he brought his lightsaber back around to parry and deflect the blaster bolts aimed at him.

He sensed the dissipation of two, three shots on his lightsaber blade, and a fourth went wide, but a fifth caught him in the right side and ripped a wide, shallow gash along the side of his ribcage. The agony was breathtaking, and reflexively he pushed out and away with the Force as he crouched low to minimize his profile and shift his lightsaber grip to a two-handed one. The second volley of shots was smaller, and he grinned savagely behind his mask as he parried the blaster bolts successfully. 

It did not matter that he was injured, or that his bodyguards were in all likelihood dead. He was Kylo Ren, First of the Knights of Ren and disciple of the Supreme Leader Snoke. His hate was pure and strong, and pain only fed and fuelled him, and he emerged from the billowing smoke like a spirit of vengeance limned in black and crimson. His robes streamed behind him and shed droplets of blood, blood that had not had the time to soak entirely into the fabric as he dove straight into the midst of his foes to cut them asunder.

\---

Hux and Ren lay tucked together like spoons for a long time afterwards, tangled in those stained sheets as their bodies slackened and unknotted in the endorphin rush.

“Ren,” Hux murmured unexpectedly. His breath stirred Ren’s hair when he spoke.

It took a few minutes for Ren to find his own voice in the sheer lassitude of the afterglow. “Yes?” 

“I can’t pretend to understand what you face in your training.” Hux shifted in bed, his voice muffled ever so slightly by the plane of Ren’s shoulder. “But if you ever need anyone to look after your stripes, I’m here.” 

“Mm,” Ren grunted drowsily in reply. They fell asleep shortly after that exchange, and had stayed that way until the reveille chimes sounded in Hux’s rooms several hours later.

\---

Kylo Ren would have had slain all his attackers in his frenzy had Captain Phasma not returned to interrupt him. The multiple detonations had alerted her, and she had drawn her Stormtroopers back to return to his side when the shooting started.

The Resistance had actually put up a fight this time – a fierce effort enabled by their cunning ambush. The spies and their partisans had managed to hide themselves in shallow trenches carved out of the forest soil. Respirators and fireproof blankets had ensured their survival when Ren had set fire to the forest, and it appeared that they had simply waited for the fertilizer bombs to go off before emerging and attacking in an attempt to assassinate him. 

The assassins had managed to land two more shots on Ren before he had closed in to engage them in lightsaber range. One of the blaster bolts had dug a gouge in the metal of his mask and stunned him briefly with its impact before a second had buried itself in his right bicep.

It amused him bitterly that he had become enough of a thorn in her mother’s side that she would have sanctioned this trap, and that had only fed his rage as he had cut the partisans down. He had cut a woman off, quite literally, at the knees and decapitated her as she had groveled screaming at his feet. He had bisected a man from navel up with an upward flick of his lightsaber, and then reversed grip directions and spitted his Bothan companion on the sizzling blade as charred organs began to spill out of the great wound in his chest and gut. 

That had left a last attacker, another human woman. She had cast away her blaster rifle to run, but he had simply held her in place with the Force, then pushed hard enough to pin her face down on the ashy, bloodstained soil. He had lifted his lightsaber to impale her, pin her like a bright insect in a collection, but Captain Phasma’s hail had played over the communications set in his helm. 

“Lord Ren,” Phasma had said as she ran up to him, and he knew that she was looking at the holes in his robe and the slow drip-drip of his own blood onto the ground. 

“Captain Phasma,” he acknowledged over the spy’s low whimper as he held the lightsaber mere centimeters from her cheek. He watched her tears of terror and pain leave clear tracks in the ash coating her face, wetting the soil and burnt grass beneath her. The plasma blade of his lightsaber trembled from the slight shaking of his left hand as shock started to set in, and he was suddenly very aware of the warmth and wetness in his right sleeve. 

“You are wounded, Lord Ren,” Phasma said coolly. They had done this before many times. 

“It is nothing,” Ren said. That was untrue. He was aware of how much he had been bleeding, and it took an effort of his considerable will to steady himself. His left hand shook slightly again, and the Resistance spy closed her eyes as the tremor brought the lightsaber blade close enough to her face to singe off a few of her eyelashes. “Take her with us,” Ren said as he took his thumb off the activation stud.

“My Lord,” Phasma said. She motioned a pair of her Stormtroopers forward, and Ren limped slowly away from the prisoner as the Stormtroopers shackled her wrists and dragged her roughly up from the ground.

\---

Ren suffered no one to tend his wounds, and most of the crew of the _Finalizer_ feared him enough to not push the point even as he bled onto the decking at his feet. He sensed no fear from Captain Phasma, but she had not reached her current rank questioning the irrational whims of her superiors. Her natural discretion kept her wisely silent as he staggered off to his private quarters, leaving a trail of bloody boot prints behind him.

Ren stripped slowly in the privacy of his own chambers, shedding his fire-singed outer robes with a shrug. He fumbled one-handed with the heavy belt at his waist, and then dropped that to the floor. His inner robes were harder to remove with the limited mobility in his right arm, but he persisted and gritted his teeth as he worked. Some of the cloth had stuck to his wounds as his blood had coagulated, and he pulled fiercely at the fabric until both clot and cloth lifted from him, splattered blood on the walls and floor around him as the wounds reopened. 

_My hate is strong,_ he told himself as he sat down on his narrow bunk, tried to remove his boots one-handed, and then gave the attempt up as futile. His last instruction to his comms console, before he lay down in his bunk, was to summon a medical droid to his quarters.

\---

Kylo Ren stirred briefly from his drugged sleep some time after the droid had left his room. He felt cool, distant, not really attached to his body. He pushed outward with the Force, felt his mind scrabble weakly at the _Finalizer’s_ hull plating as his grip slipped. He was still too full of painkillers to focus his mind well, and the darkness of his room made him want to go back to sleep. Nevertheless he sensed someone approaching, a presence that smelled to his non-senses of iron restraint and coppery ambition and hate, hate bitter and strong like a medicinal draught.

The door to his room beeped briefly as someone overruled its locks, and then hissed open to reveal a tallness silhouetted in his doorway, strong features and cold blue eyes limned faintly by sterile hallway light before the door hissed shut again. 

“General Hux,” Ren said from his bed. He did not summon the room lights. 

“Lord Ren.” Hux said. Boots clicked against the metal floor and then there was a warmth and weight at the edge of his bunk as Hux sat down next to him. “I’m here to check your stripes.”

Ren tried to count backwards in time, reckoning with his heartbeats, and failed utterly to do so. “How did you –” he started to ask, and then chastised himself silently for the stupid obviousness of that question. The drugs had left him slightly slow on the uptake. “No. I know,” he said at last, after that thought had managed to coalesce in his mind. “Captain Phasma.” 

“She notified me that you had been injured, but I checked and saw that you had summoned a droid from Medical. The report from Medical said the best thing was to let you sleep, so I did.” Hux tugged carefully at Ren’s boots as he spoke, pulled them off one after the other and let them drop with dull thumps onto the floor. 

“Mm,” Ren sighed drowsily. “What is the time?” 

“Two hours after the end of my watch. I would have come sooner, but we had to process that prisoner.” Hux did not sound as tired as he should have been, but Ren could taste it on the surface of his mind, weariness, worry, relief swirling in an ephemeral cloud about him. Ren decided then to wait silently for Hux to continue speaking. He saw no point in interrupting him with drug-fuzzed idiocies. 

“I’ve read the report from the interrogations,” Hux continued as he reached out with a gloved hand, traced the line of Ren’s cheekbone with a fingertip. “I’ll have it brought to you with your breakfast tomorrow.” 

“Good.” Ren closed his eyes as Hux smoothed his tangled, unruly hair away from his brow, and then the warmth and weight at the edge of the bunk vanished, and then there was only the click of boots across the floor, the hiss of the door opening and closing, and then the quiet beep as the room lock re-engaged itself.


End file.
